Community Wishlist/Wishes/Fix main bugs in Wikidata and WDQS handling of dates/en
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Fix main bugs in Wikidata and WDQS handling of dates Open
Description
The handling of dates in Wikidata (and, more generally, in Wikibase) has some longstanding bugs that are significantly detrimental for user experience, both in editing and in data retrieval through WDQS. The main bugs with which I'm concerned are the following:
- editing, phab:T310981: it is possible to add dates with precision 9 or lower with two different encodes, so that the same date can be added twice, and typically users don't understand why; as of now the problem in Wikidata is mitigated by periodical bot fixes, that unfortunately flood page histories and anyway lead to a useless loss of archival space; one of these encodes has to be disallowed
- editing again, phab:T168379: quality constraints regarding dates often show false positives, which confuse users while editing;
- querying, phab:T159160: in query results dates with precision 9 or lower are always shown as having precision 11, with a great number of "January 1, YEAR" which are in fact just years or decades or centuries; this can be detrimental for data reusers, which - ignoring date precision - could just import in their database a significant amount of falsely day-precise dates;
- querying again, phab:T246731: in query results dates with Julian calendar are (correctly) associated with Julian calendar but incorrectly converted into Gregorian calendar, so that the data reuser has no possibility to retrieve the original Julian date and, worse, is given as Julian date a date which is in fact its conversion into Gregorian date; this can lead to severe mistake-propagations among reusers of Julian dates in Wikidata; the issue has already raised concerns about medievalist (see Are our Wikibase QueryServices about to mess up two millennia of historical dates? and At least a make shift solution: The “Julian calendar stabiliser”)
In order to make Wikidata dates more easy to edit and avoid mistakes in their retrieval, which are also significantly detrimental for Wikidata's reputation, I think these bugs deserve to be fixed.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Bug fix
Related projects
Wikidata
Affected users
Wikidata editors and data reusers